Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than five decades. With a stage show that includes guillotines, the gallows, the electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors and baby dolls, Cooper had drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of heavy metal that was designed to shock.
Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. Taking on the name in 1968 the Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit “I’m Eighteen”, which was followed in 1972 by the even bigger single “School’s Out”, which reached #1 in the UK during that summer. The band reached their commercial peak with the transatlantic #1 album Billion Dollar Babies in 1973. read more
Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than five decades. With a stage show that includes guillotines, the gallows, the electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors and baby dolls, Cooper had drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of heavy metal that was designed to shock.
Alice Cooper was originally a band consisting of Furnier on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. Taking on the name in 1968 the Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit “I’m Eighteen”, which was followed in 1972 by the even bigger single “School’s Out”, which reached #1 in the UK during that summer. The band reached their commercial peak with the transatlantic #1 album Billion Dollar Babies in 1973.
Furnier’s solo career as Alice Cooper, legally adopting the band’s name as his own, began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare and reached his commercial peak with the 1989 hit “Poison”. His most recent studio release was Along Came a Spider, his 18th solo album, in 2008. Expanding from his original Detroit-based garage rock roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles, including art rock, conceptual rock, rock and roll, jazz, new wave, and heavy metal music
Alice Cooper is known for his social and witty persona offstage. The Rolling Stone Album Guide goes so far as to call him the world’s most “beloved heavy metal entertainer”. He helped to shape the sound and look of heavy metal, and is seen as the person who “first introduced horror imagery to rock’n’roll, and whose stagecraft and showmanship have permanently transformed the genre”. Away from music, Cooper is a film actor, a golfing celebrity, a restaurateur and, since 2004, a popular radio DJ with his classic rock show Nights with Alice Cooper.—wikipedia
In December 2010, it was announced that in 2011 the original Alice Cooper band would be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
